Medical Billing - GnuCash

[Walt Pennington]

Hi Elizabeth,

We are working on a similar project in the USA with OpenEMR.  In the
USA, there are two payers:  the insurer and the subscriber.  The larger
part of our payment comes from the insurer.  Insurers have different and
sometimes incompatible billing formats.  Those insurers, including
government payment programs, are moving to a standard electronic format
beginning in October 2003 and finishing in late 2004, but currently we
create separate billing formats for many of the insurers.  

For medical billing there are two principal options.  Those options are:
the medical application or the accounting application.  

We chose the medical application for billing and carry the A/R to the
accounting program to process payments.  This allows us to create
reports based on patients seen, billing by code, total billings by
physician, code billings by physician and other reports.  It also allows
us to take advantage of the patient and insurer information that we have
already recorded in the patient demographic information without
substantial reworking of the accounting application.

For example, when a patient arrives for a visit, you need their name,
identification, insurance, address, telephone, email and other relevant
information.  By billing with the medical application, we take advantage
of this information.  If we tried to use GnuCash for billing, we would
either re-enter all of this information into GnuCash, or spend a large
amount of time customizing GnuCash to bill the insurers, and accept the
patient information from our application.

Walt


On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 04:10, Elizabeth Dodd wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Sep 2003 01:23 am, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Elizabeth Dodd <edodd at medemail.com.au> writes:
> > > yes, but I don't have to usually deal with the invoicing bits with
> > > gnucash. I haven't found adding customers intuitive.
> >
> > Could you please expand upon this statement?  In what way is adding
> > customers non-intuitive?  Or are you not talking about GnuCash?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > -derek
> I was experimenting with gnucash to see if i could do office billing with it 
> for a medical practice. my education is in very practical things, not 
> accounting, and as usual when experimenting with software i didn't read any 
> documentation (what's new?). it took me many tries to add a customer and many 
> more to make an invoice. that's why i think it isn't intuitive.
> after the event i realised that i was missing many things - that it was 
> pointless trying to add customers without the concept of accounts receivable 
> in use.
> checking now, the customer is requested as a company, but i wanted to be able 
> to bill individuals, and they would fall into groups (families) and they need 
> to be able to change groups (eg leave home and be billed under their own 
> name)
> I am a small part of a group building medical software (gnumed) and we will 
> eventually be needing gnucash for the other part of our daily work. 
> Liz